Archive for December, 2008

Reading up on iPhone accessibility on the web, I ran across a blog post, Apple blind to iPhone accessibility?, on Ouch, thee BBC’s quirky and lively disability community. The post put me in mind of my recent post, De Facto Foolishness. We both discuss the hostility on the internet towards discussions of making Apples’s...
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Despite not being an economist, the NY Times’ Tom Friedman makes good economic sense to me in his recent column, Win, Win, Win, Win, Win …. Speaking about falling oil and gas prices, Friedman had this to say: Which play? The one where gasoline prices go up, pressure rises for more fuel-efficient cars, then...
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The new WordPress 2.7 is great. I really like the new layout. Spotting how to hide and show the left side bar was a bit tricky. Now that I know how to do it, I no longer have overlapping columns after zooming in Firefox. Other than that a few broken plugins, it has been...
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To many people, web site accessibility involves screen readers. Well, not all the visually impaired were created equal. Consequently, there needs to be a variety of routes to accessibility. For me, and many others, simple changes are all that is necessary to make a site readable. Most often, easily adjustable font and color schemes...
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Great for Beginners to Flash Photography As versatile as the SB-600 flash is, Nikon’s SB-400 is a much less intimidating start to flash photography for the beginner. Using the 400 opens your eyes to the possibilities of bouncing and diffusing the flash. When used in the manual or priority modes on the D40 (and...
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The Blind Photographers group on Flickr has its own blog, Best of Blind Photographers, now. The blog highlights a few of the best photos each week from our community of over one hundred blind and visually-impaired photographers. If you find this post useful or interesting, please consider buying me a cup of coffee.
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Inertia is not just a physical phenomenon. Inertia, through habit and tradition, also slows humanity. Many inefficiencies, big and small, clutter our lives unnecessarily. Many began as quirks of history, gaining traction only as the inertia of habit and tradition set in. One famous example is the so-called QWERTY keyboard layout that we are...
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Twitter today pointed me to the Boston Globe’s blog, The Big Picture. As the blog describes itself, The Big Picture is a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com, entries are posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday by Alan Taylor. Inspired by publications like Life Magazine (of old), National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com’s...
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Following up on my Strobist-for-the-visually-impaired posts, Didacylos’ Strobe and the first update, I have received some great suggestions. The first suggestion is about using a portable DVD player as a tethered LCD. David Tejada discusses Proofing with portable DVD on his blog. This neatly finds the middle ground between the camera’s tiny screen and...
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Image Zoom is one of my favorite Firefox accessibility extensions. In Access the Web!, I extolled the virtues of this little program. Image Zooma allows you to zoom an image in and out while it stays in place. There is no need to open it up in another window or to download it. Image...
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If you are getting caught up in photography and want to ride the minimalist (Strobist) wave, as good a place to start as any is Kirk Tuck’s Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography. Along with the Strobist blog and lighting guide, this is a detailed, useful, practical, concrete, and helpful guide to getting...
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Continuing with my series of older photos, this one is a number of years old. Taken in Boston’s Fenway. my wife’s niece has begun wandering away to investigate all these geese and the pond tht is their summer home. I was following with my camera and captured her. I like how she stands out...
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A few days ago, I ran across sometihng called the Shorty Awards on Twitter. The seem to be a light-hearted way to leverage the TwitterVerse for a little fun. The Shorty Awards honor the world’s top Twitterers. You can nominate as many people for as many categories as you’d like until midnight December 31st....
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The Blind Flaneur makes an important point in a recent blog post, Preserving the Future’s Creative Raw Material in the Public Domain. These days, authors and musicians protect their work online using Digital Rights Managment (DRM). DRM, however, almost always makes the content being protected inaccessible to the visually impaired. DRM is not inherently...
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Boy, do I wish that I had a better camera and better light when I took this shot. I love the context and the pose. What more can I say? If you find this post useful or interesting, please consider buying me a cup of coffee.
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